Menacing
modelWisconsin's proposal for confronting the new outbreak
of CWD is radical: Since the disease is difficult to diagnose and impossible
to treat, the only way to contain the disease is to get rid of all deer
around the infected zone. "We really are going to go after every one"
of the 15,000 deer, says wildlife ecologist John Cary.

This deer skull, taken from the eradication zone west of Madison, may have carried chronic wasting disease.
The numbskull who nailed it to a garage didn't bother to find out...

Landowners are being urged to increase hunting on
property in the hot zone. Because overpopulation of deer likely helped
cause the epidemic -- by increasing the chances of disease transmission
-- hunting restrictions will be eased around the hot zone in an effort
to thin the deer herd.

When amateur hunters run out of steam, the state
Department of Natural Resources may send in teams of sharpshooters to
kill survivors. Although helicopters may be used to drive deer toward
shooters, Cary considers that unlikely due to predictable public backlash.

To project the future of the epidemic, Cary built
a computer model of population changes in white-tail deer, and then ran
it with various assumptions for a period of 25 years.

But will it work?Score's hunters 1, deer 0 after this hunt. Hunters
help control a skyrocketing deer population in Wisconsin and many other
states. California
Department of Fish & Game.

Under many combinations of conditions, CWD would be eliminated in under
five years, he says. There are several reasons to think eradication can
work, Cary adds.

First, deer are not marathon runners. "We can do
a square mile at a time, and they will not spread out automatically. They
are stuck onto the landscape more than people think." Females don't stray
far from mom, and while males wander, they cluster around females.

Second, while the mechanism of CWD transmission among
deer is unknown, the infectious agent is unlikely to survive indefinitely in the environment.
Prions, Cary says, are "a protein, and they do degrade after a while.
It's not something that can last indefinitely, like anthrax."

The Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources has
said it might have to keep killing deer for 5 years, but Cary's computer
projections indicate that the grisly job may be done sooner. Other simulations, with inadequate testing and eradication efforts, fail to eliminate CWD even after many years, he adds.

Wiping out entire herds of deer is nobody's idea
of "have a nice day," but the results of sitting idly by are grim. The
disease seems to be spreading fast, and Cary says the computer projects
that "80 percent of deer in the model would become infected in 15 years,
and the herd would collapse."

While admitting that this result is based on a sample
of only about 500 deer, Cary says it's a disturbing prospect, especially
since it considers neither harm to deer outside the hot zone nor the possibility
that CWD might even jump to other species.

Hunt deer? Although nobody is known to have caught brain disease
from eating chronically wasted deer, government authorities cannot and
will not guarantee that deer is safe food. There is, after all, that sobering
parallel from across the pond.

For a decade, as thousands of beef cows staggered
and slobbered to their deaths, the government of the United Kingdom claimed
that British beef was safe. Then, in 1996, in a red-faced about-face,
it admitted that tainted beef had probably caused dozens of cases of Creutzfeldt-Jakob
disease.

The prospect, however remote, of dying of a gruesome
brain disease has apparently cast a shadow on deer hunting. A recent survey
found that 36 percent of Wisconsin hunters are reassessing whether to
take up arms against Bambi this fall, threatening the hunt's estimated
$1 billion economic contribution and undermining its role in controlling
the overabundance of white-tails.

A
decline of hunting would also have social impacts, says Thomas Heberlein,
a long-time hunter and professor emeritus of rural sociology at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison. "Deer are hunted for meat and for social purposes.
Families come together, fathers and sons, and increasingly daughters.
It's a very strong family tradition, it's often tied to place, like a
hunting shack or the land of grandfather's farm; it's a big part of what
the state is like."

Heberlein worries about the effects of "14 sick
deer that changed the world." In particular, he asks, will the cure, eradication,
be worse than the disease, CWD? Instead of overplaying the danger, he
says, reporters should be looking to Colorado and Wyoming, where, despite
the long epidemic of CWD in deer and elk, no human disease has been pinned
on venison.

Should the state hunt down the last deer in the
eradication zone, he asks, or should it tell hunters, "'There's some additional
risk, and what we going to do to reduce that risk'? I am more interested
in preserving the deer hunt, and its many social benefits, than in preserving
the health of deer at all costs."

If one-third of Wisconsin deer hunters stay home during the
hunt, will that change the state's landscape?